Did they spread themselves too thin?
Electronic Arts, or EA as most people refer to them, make a huge amount of games every year. They cover everything from racing to fps, MMO to RTS and even simulation.
While they have been pumping out many games what they failed to forsee (and in all honesty, how could they have) was that if the economy went down, spending would also drop.
This caused the US$641 million loss in Q3 '08, even though they had quite significant revenues - they put it down to operating costs.
In an attempt to reduce these, EA will cut down the number of titles it's working on to fifty, close down operations in expensive regions and drop eleven percent of their workforce - equivalent to 1100 workers.
While this seems to be bad news for EA, if this forces them to cut the extra fluff and concentrate on fewer, actually good games it could turn out to be great news for gamers. Head over to gamesindustry to check it out.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009